Saturday, 19 August 2017

023. Winning By "House"

White: J.J. Wagenbach - friendly thematic, 1998

Twenty years ago (really?!) we used to play friendly thematic games to test out variations of the Wagenbach. One line which saw quite a bit of action was 4 Bc4 h4 5 Ne5!?, whereby White tries to improve on 5 d4 g5 6 Ne5 (as in Game 1) by attacking f7 before Black has played ...g7-g5, so that a later ...Qf6 does not also defend the rook in the corner. After a while, 5...Nh6 6 Qh5 Qe7! was worked out to be fine for Black and the line was more or less abandoned, but not before we'd had several interesting games. The one below is one such.

However, I'm not showing this game for any reason of Wagenbach "theory", nor subjecting it to modern computer analysis, but rather because of a possible position at move 32. Here White might have played 32 Rh1!? and claimed a win by "house"; i.e. by filling in a complete line on the board – and, very oddly, on the h-file.

Obviously, there's no such rule in chess, so János opted for something more sensible in 32 Bg3 (and only subsequently went wrong). All the same, I might as White have played 32 Rh1!? anyway, just because.